Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

You see, if you are 30 years ahead of your time, you will always have difficulty speaking with the bosses in the industry. They are too conservative.

I'm a very peaceful man. In the '80s, I was the chief designer at Thyssen, one of the biggest companies in Germany. But when they asked me to design armored vehicles, tanks, and submarines, I quit overnight.

Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

I learned to ask myself questions like: Why is something made the way it is? Why does a motorcar look like it does? Is it right or wrong? What is an airplane? Why is it shaped like that? Then, later, I became a diver and studied subaquatic life and the streamlining of sharks and manta rays. Any fish is superior to the shapes we humans have invented - and unchanged for 250 million years, imagine!

Look at nature - look at birds, look at fish. Things that look good, work good. People don't get the message of ergonomics.

If I had been president, I would have come out and declared: "Nothing there, ever! This place stays as it is. We make a big place there where people can pray about the errors we have made that those two towers had to fall."